Unexplained outage causes chaos and raises questions about heavy reliance on a single service at all levels of government, public services, business and society
The Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) has scotched rumours that that it caused the two-hour outage of the M-PESA mobile money service on 9 January. There had been suggestions that the service was taken down to enable M-pesa, owned and run by Safaricom, to be integrated with the KRA’s IT systems.
KRA said on X this was “fake news”, according to a report in The Kenya Times, contradicting social media posts blaming it for the downtime.
M-Pesa apologised for the outage but did not explain what had caused it. The outage caused disruption for many Kenyans who rely on it for all their transactions, and business complained about lost revenue. It also halted the provision of critical government services, revenue collection by government agencies and caused congestion at major payment points of various businesses and institutions, according to People’s Daily.
Knocked confidence
Some said the episode had dented confidence in the service. Certainly it has highlighted the impact of heavy reliance on a single commercial provider: Safaricom controls close to 65% of the Kenyan mobile money market has about 32 million M-Pesa customers. The outage reportedly affected more than 800,000 agents and businesses, and the delivery of some public services ground to halt as payments could not be processed.
In the year to the end of March 2023, Safaricom handled 26 billion transactions.